My Favorite Programming Fonts for Visual Studio Development

I spend almost 6 hours everyday, working on Visual Studio. That makes me experiment with the type, color and size of the fonts I use in my IDE, to make my development environment look hot and fresh! Here’s a list of my favorite programming fonts. Please note that this list is just my personal preference.

Consolas

Consolas is a great font for Visual Studio development, designed by Luc(as) de Groot, for Microsoft’s ClearType font family. Consolas has proportions closer to normal text, which makes it more reader-friendly than many other monospaced fonts. I have a big LCD screen and I just love the way this font looks on it. Although it is a commercial font, it is bundled with Visual Studio. If you do not have the Consolas font on your machine, you can download the entire pack over here.

Note: You may also want to look at Inconsolata which is a free monospaced font inspired by the Consolas font and designed by Raph Levien.

Here’s how a Consolas 11 point looks

DejaVu Sans

I am a huge fan of the DejaVu font family. Although the font looks similar to Consolas, I like the taller rounder characters and the extra whitespace (compared to Consolas) in this font. This font looks great when I am working on a dark background theme. You can download the font here (Just double click on the DejaVuSansMono.ttf file to install it and restart Visual Studio)

Here’s how a DejaVu Sans Mono 11 point looks

Monaco

Monaco is the monospace font on the Mac. I like this font because its neat, has good amount of space between each line and the way it represents a 0 (zero) with a slash. I call it the ‘programmer’s font for designers’. You can download the font here.

Here’s how a Monaco 10 point looks

Lucida Console

Lucida Console is a variant of Lucida Sans Typewriter with smaller line spacing. To be honest, I do not have any specific reason for using this font. I just like it.

Here’s how a Lucida Console 11 point looks

Proggy

Proggy is a set of fixed-width screen fonts that are distributed in Microsoft's .fon format, the truetype (ttf) format, as well as XWindows. The font works fine on a Mac too. I particularly favor the Proggy Clean (Slashed Zero). You can download it here (ProggyCleanSZ.ttf)

Here’s a how a Proggy Clean (Slashed Zero) 11 point looks

Courier New

I often use this font when I am working with my old desktop/laptops with non LCD display. Although this font may not be as attractive as the others listed in this post, I still prefer this font, since I have been using it for a long time. You may also want to look at AnonymousPro which is a modern serif font designed for LCD displays and scales well on high-res.

Here’s how a Courier New 11 point looks

Well that was a list of my favorite programming fonts for Visual Studio. You may also want to look at a good article at CodeProject.com that lists 42 best monospaced fonts.

@AnonymousWhy the hate for white backgrounds?I've been a 40+ hr/week coder for 15 years now, and I use a white background!I've tried light/dark versus dark/light, and for ME, I can see better/longer on white.YMMV but don't say we're not leet haxors if we dont use black...

I also prefer a lighter background to a darker one (for some reason, it's easier on my eyes). However, I tone down the pure white background (255,255,255) to an ivory color, reducing some of the harshness of the blue (255,255,243).

Oh so you're not a serious coder now if you use a white background? Is this based on any evidence or just the usual coder received wisdom because all the cool programmer guys are saying it on some stupid forum?